Claudia Rubin is in her heyday. Wife, mother, rabbi and sometime moral voice of the nation, it is she whom everyone wants to be with at her older son's glorious February wedding. Until Leo becomes a bolter and the heyday of the Rubin family begins to unravel...His calm, married, more mature sister, Frances, tries to hold the centre together but the stresses, for Frances, force her to re-examine her own middle way and lead to a decision as shocking in its way as Leo's has been. Meanwhile, Claudia's husband Norman has, uncharacteristically, a secret to hide - a secret whose imminent unveiling he can do nothing about...A warm, poignant and true portrayal of a London family in crisis, in love, in denial and - ultimately - in luck.

When We Were Bad: A Novel

Charlotte Mendelson

Picador

Literature & Fiction

Literary

When We Were Bad

Contemporary

Anna Raine is desperate: to escape Somerset, to evade her mother, and above all, to find a model of adulthood on whom to base her future self. When Stella, her mother`s thrillingly reckless younger sister offers her a Bloomsbury flat Anna feels sure that some form of stardom will shortly follow.

Love in Idleness

In a shabby, book-choked house in North Oxford live the Lux family. Victor, a dedicated professor, is desperate to be elected to give the prestigious annual Spenser lecture. Jean, his unassuming wife, is tentatively experimenting with the boundaries of her marital freedom. Eve, an over-achiever like her father, is suffering from a dangerous teenage angst - straining to achieve top marks in her exams and yet always in the shadow of her younger sister, Pheobe, who is perfect, it seems. Into this climate of repression and bitterness there comes an unworldly don, Victor's bete-noir, who shows interest in the vulnerable Eve. Meanwhile, Jean's best friend, Helen, has something she is yearning to tell: a confession that may alter everyone's constrainingly absurd life for ever. Daughters of Jerusalem is a captivating tale of hidden love and secret hatred, of the desire to belong and the need for escape, and of the fine line between wanting to be discovered and fearing the consequences when the delicious unknown becomes brutally exposed...

Daughters of Jerusalem

`I loved it. The evocation of ennui and loneliness rings very true . . . great unexpected observations . . . very funny' Lesley Glaister Anna Raine is desperate: to escape Somerset, to evade her mother, and above all to find a model of adulthood on whom to base her future self. When Stella, her mother's reckless younger sister, offers her London flat, Anna's buried curiosity about Stella quickly becomes fascination: dark secrets, she is certain, lie within her reach. While by day Anna feigns efficient adulthood, by night she sinks into an increasingly heated world of discovery. As secrets rise to the surface she tries to focus on London - on anything other than her aunt. But the truth has its own momentum, and when Stella returns from Paris, something, or everything, is going to give . . . `With her gift for light humour, Mendelson seems to be skipping across the surface. Then she'll suddenly dive into a world of obsession' Independent on Sunday `A strange, stealthy, headily scented seethe of a book' Ali Smith, Glasgow Herald

Gardening can be viewed as a largely pointless hobby, but the evangelical zeal and camaraderie it generates is unique. Charlotte Mendelson is perhaps unusually passionate about it. For despite her superficially normal existence, despite the fact that she has only six square metres of grotty urban soil and a few pots, she has a secret life. She is an extreme gardener, an obsessive, an addict. And like all addicts, she wants to spread the joy. Her garden may look like a nasty drunk old man's mini-allotment, chaotic, virtually flowerless, with weird recycling and nowhere to sit. When honoured friends are shown it, they tend to laugh. However, it is actually a tiny jungle, a minuscule farm, a wildly uneconomical experiment in intensive edible cultivation, on which she grows a taste of perhaps a hundred kinds of delicious fruits and odd vegetables. It is a source of infinite happiness and deep peace. It looks completely bonkers. Arguably, it's the most expensive, time-consuming, undecorative and self-indulgent way to grow a salad ever invented, but when tired or sad or cross it never fails to delight.

Rhapsody In Green

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Gardening & Landscape Design

Kyle Books

Almost English: the heart-breaking Man Booker-longlisted novel from the author of The Exhibitionist

Mask of Apollo: A Virago Modern Classic

mary-renault

Little, Brown Book Group Limited

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Charlotte Mendelson. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Charlotte Mendelson

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Charlotte Mendelson. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

When We Were Bad: A Novel

When We Were Bad: A Novel

When We Were Bad

Love in Idleness

Daughters of Jerusalem

Love in Idleness

Rhapsody In Green

Almost English: the heart-breaking Man Booker-longlisted novel from the author of The Exhibitionist

When We Were Bad

Mask of Apollo: A Virago Modern Classic